At the suggestion of an Adobe sales person, I upgraded my PShop CS3 to CS4. The sales person told me that CS4 with Vista Ultimate 32 bit would use close to 4 gigs of RAM if it was available. However, on my system with the RAM usage set to 96%, CS4 uses no more RAM than CS3 did... about 1.6 gigs of my 4 gigs.

Should CS4 use full RAM with Vista 32 bit? If not, is there a PC operating system that will allow CS4 to use up to 4 gigs of RAM?

I honestly donīt know what the maximum RAM is today, Iīd guess around 16 (which is probably overdoing it). My work one has 12 and itīs just something that the guys at work put together for me so I doubt thereīs a single manufacturer. I can try to find out for you next week.

Vista 64 is suprisingly good, I was reluctant to use it cause of the stigma around it but it was the only choice I had. I haveīnt had any problems with it and with just a few settings itīs pretty much like xp only better.

I honestly donīt know what the maximum RAM is today, Iīd guess around 16 (which is probably overdoing it). My work one has 12 and itīs just something that the guys at work put together for me so I doubt thereīs a single manufacturer. I can try to find out for you next week.

Vista 64 is suprisingly good, I was reluctant to use it cause of the stigma around it but it was the only choice I had. I haveīnt had any problems with it and with just a few settings itīs pretty much like xp only better.

This is bringing happiness to my heart. Any version of Vista that is much like XP has to be an imporvement...

If you do find and info next week, please pass it on. I'm going to start seriously looking for a new system, probably with Vista 64.

Apps in a 32-bit OS can only ever really access around two gigs on a 4 gig system. The top gigabyte is typically unavailable because Windows uses it to shadow your video RAM. The bottom gig is used by the OS and your background processes. That leaves the middle two gigs for apps to work with.

If you're running out of RAM in Win32, your best bet is to move to Win64.

Nag: I believe maximum RAM depends on what version of Vista you have. I think for Vista Ultimate it's 48 gigs._________________brian.prince|light.comp.paint

im pretty tempted by 24gigs and using 8 or so as a RAM Disk for PS Scratch

Why use the RAM for scratch... Do you mean that CS4 will not use the full (or designated percentage of) RAM, so a RAM disk as scratch is the next best thing?_________________HonePie.comtumblr blogdigtal art

Photoshop needs the same amount of scratch as you have RAM, so if you allocate 8GB of RAM to PS, it needs 8GB or more for scratch.. a rotating platter of silicone is infinitely slower than RAM, so for ultimate performance, you want to use RAM before hitting the platter

Photoshop needs the same amount of scratch as you have RAM, so if you allocate 8GB of RAM to PS, it needs 8GB or more for scratch.. a rotating platter of silicone is infinitely slower than RAM, so for ultimate performance, you want to use RAM before hitting the platter

btw Eyewoo, before you go and buy a new operation system then I recommend checking out the windows 7 evaluation. Iīm running it at home and itīs working perfectly. (supposed to be faster than vista as well). You can use it for free until June or July next year.

Well... my new system is arriving on Wednesday. Dell desk top with 12 gigs, Vista Ultimate, 64 bit.

Not being that technical, I generally do not want to try a new OS until it's been around awhile. That applies to some software, as well. I learned that when I first started using CorelDRAW! about 15 years ago. That's when they were using their customers as beta testers on what was billed as finished products.

Set up the new system - 12 gig with Vista 64 and PShop CS4... using it with my Cintiq... There is a very annoying lag. I seem to recall in an earlier version of Photoshop, there was some setting that could be turned off which increased speed and decreased lag... Sorry I can't be more specific than that. It was several years ago - maybe PShop 7. AT any rate, might there be something similar in CS4 --- Files in the 3 to 4 Gig Ram become very difficult to work with..._________________HonePie.comtumblr blogdigtal art

You have to turn ON Aero. If I remember correctly then you just right-click on the desktop and go into window color and appearance settings (or something like that). It makes all the windows and UI semi transparent and slick. What it does is it makes the UI and the windows run on the GPU and thus frees up the CPU.

Sounds kinda stupid to have to turn something on that is graphically intense to reduce lag but thatīs what happens.

You might notice some annoying circles appearing around the pen when you click. You just have to turn them off in the tablet-pc window in control panel. There are a few annoying options like that but once you get them out of the way everything should be fine.

Thanks Nag... Have that all set up and rebooted, but the problem still exists.

When doing a cross hatch technique, if I get a line started and swish back and forth without lifting the stylus, the line pretty much stays close to the stylus point. However, if I cross hatch by lifting the stylus to draw a series of separate lines, they get way behind and sometimes lose their brush characteristic for several lines - i.e. a thick non-descript line is drawn.

I'm working here with a 3 gig file with 10 gigs assigned to Photoshop.

I have now noticed that the problem decreases with less layers, even though used RAM may be higher... Seems to have something to do with the amount of layers. On this particular file there are about 15 layers.

Also, the file was started in CS3 32 bit, but after being saved in CS4 64 bit the file on disk is about twice as large. Does that have to do with the 32 to 62 bit change?

...and noticed something else. Large files (this one is 32000 x 20000 pixels) get saved by PShop with a PSB extension rather than a PSD extension... ?_________________HonePie.comtumblr blogdigtal art

well.. the size you are working on is REALLY big, the largest I personally paint is around 8000. (then scale it up using genuine fractals if needed) So Iīm not really surprised youīre experiencing lag. Iīm not sure technology is smooth for sizes like that yet.

Also, the file was started in CS3 32 bit, but after being saved in CS4 64 bit the file on disk is about twice as large. Does that have to do with the 32 to 62 bit change?

Yes

From Wikipedia:

"The main disadvantage of 64-bit architectures is that relative to 32-bit architectures the same data occupies more space in memory (due to swollen pointers and possibly other types and alignment padding). This increases the memory requirements of a given process and can have implications for efficient processor cache utilization."

Just guessing here:
So basically the old 32bit file has an extra 32bits worth of zeroes (padding) added to it to fill out the 64bit addressing. So a single pixel of data that used to use 32bits now uses 64bits.

I don't know why you would need such a high resolution. Even the Star Wars 360-degree mattepaintings were smaller I think.

The biggest image I've used recently was around 12k wide, and that was for a sky cyclorama that I used in a 3d animation.

I'm not painting... I'm drawing a layout in detail for an eventual oil painting that will be 4 feet x 6 or 7 feet. Drawing digitally is a bit different than painting. I like to have a nice, clean line that is as close to a pencil line as possible. Some of the details within the larger composition can be seen in this thread: http://forums.sijun.com/viewtopic.php?t=42438_________________HonePie.comtumblr blogdigtal art

...and noticed something else. Large files (this one is 32000 x 20000 pixels) get saved by PShop with a PSB extension rather than a PSD extension... ?

PSD-files have a limitation of being 30k wide and 2GB in size I believe. If you exceed that, you're forced to use PSB. It's just the same as psd minus those size limitations, and that PSBs aren't compatible with old versions (prior to CS).

The most annoying thing is that when you have a psd file that you're working on, and you exceed the 2GB and save, it goes through all the saving process (which could take a long time..). Only AFTER the save is complete it tells you that Photoshop was unable to save as psd, and you have to re-save as psb.. and waste another 15 minutes of your life watching the saving process.